On-line procedure for terminating an accelerated degradation test. Statistica Sinica

Abstract: Accelerated degradation testing (ADT) is a useful technique to extrap-olate the lifetime of highly reliable products under normal use conditions if there exists a quality characteristic of the product whose degradation over time can be related to reliability. One practical problem arising from designing a degradation experiment is “how long should an accelerated degradation experiment last for col-lecting enough data to allow one to make inference about the product lifetime under the normal use condition? ” In this paper, we propose an intuitively appealing pro-cedure to determine an appropriate termination time for an ADT. Finally, we use some light-emitting diode (LED) data to demonstrate the proposed procedure. Key words and phrases: Accelerated degradation test (ADT), degradation path, highly reliable product, termination time. 1